elyse longair

in conversation with naomi potter

This interview took shape over several email conversations between Elyse Longair and Naomi Potter from August to October of 2022, and focused on the artist’s collage practice as well as her ongoing interest in sourcing photographic imagery that speaks to imaginary worlds, alternative futures, and worldbuilding.

naomi potter: Both instruments and machines in these images are clearly analogue; the banks of dials, levers, phones, and monitors—all part of a complex system of monitoring human exploration of space. I see a kind of parallel in the process of collage, yet these images are not made from cutting up paper and gluing fragments together to make images. Rather, they are also made digitally, which makes a very analogue process much more seamless and, to some extent, more believable. These images look like the illustrations of a science fiction novel, but they also look very believable and real, as if they were taken from a documentary. Can you comment on your use of collage, digital manipulation, and the fine line between fiction and reality these images evoke?

elyse longair: My collages are created analogue, by hand, which requires a lot of time spent studying what images are and searching for possible relationships to reimagine beyond the realities and meanings of the “original.” At the most basic level, I see an image as a representation that points to the world in some manner, which for me is important because images do not simply re-present “the real” but, especially in contemporary culture, they create our sense of reality. In other words, images are carefully curated pauses in time, capturing a specific edited vision of history and reality. My interest is in what could exist beyond that moment, outside the frame of the image.

You bring up something interesting that I think about a lot, which is the reality or the believability of my collages. Like Max Ernst, my aesthetic embraces a seamless, flat quality that allows the viewer to imagine freely the possibility of the image. I accomplish this by scanning my collages to eliminate the cut lines and reduce the colour and texture variances. I find limiting the source material also pushes the viewer to negotiate between the obvious images and those that are more subtle. Once scanned, I spend around eight or nine hours, sometimes more, working with each collage onscreen. I zoom into the pixels and erase any dust, scratches, or damage and clean up any noticeable cutlines before printing my work large-scale for exhibition. One of my mentors, Dr. Julian Haladyn, was surprised and fascinated when he learned I keep my analogue collages as fragments to reuse images from both the front and back of the original. What interested him, and something I appreciate, is how the scanner unifies the fragments, which makes the final printed collage both a presentation of the merged fragments and a representation of the analogue composition.

np: These collages embrace a kind of nostalgia that can often be found in science fiction; they contain images that are both speculative in imagining a futuristic blending of science and technology, while they are also deeply rooted in the imagery of space exploration that was driven by the Cold War and the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. What draws you to the images you use? And what is the source of these images?

el: I continually build an archive of images sampled from our image-rich world, specifically popular knowledge source material—ranging from National Geographic (often from the seventies, eighties, and nineties) to contemporary issues of Vogue. Searching for images in magazines is very different than searching for them online. I enjoy the material randomness that occurs when I flip through them. I come upon things much more randomly, in a sense, and I can more easily see the possibilities within images. I rely on my intuition and understanding in my selection—when something interests me, I cut it out. I am drawn to “simple images” in both composition and the time they might represent—an alternate time in the past or distant future. The imagery is simple and special in that it isn’t always fast-paced, full of action, over-curated, crowded, or always trying to sell us something—not in the same way images in magazines often are today. I look for photographs that have enough space, that invite me to insert an additional image or two into them. When selecting images, it is always important that the imagery I choose must also make logical sense within the larger worlds and futures I am imagining through collage.

np: Scale is an important part of this work. In this publication the images have been reproduced at a much-reduced scale, but when you have exhibited them in a gallery context, they are always much larger. Can you speak to scale and how they can operate in different sizes for different contexts?

el:The ideal way to experience my work is large-scale in an exhibition context, which celebrates the material worlds of my collages.

Each collage’s scale is carefully considered during the analogue stage—images’ frames are expanded by overlapping images or placing two images side by side, or they are edited down through cropping. I generally print my work three feet high by various widths determined by shifting the imagery, while also working with restrictions created by the frame of the source material. As a result, the images do not have standard printing sizes typically found in photography; instead, each collage has its own unique dimensions.

The material reality is also highlighted through the qualities of reproduction seen in the thin paper quality and the Ben Day printing process. I welcome the CMYK dots—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. When you look closely, you will see the dots are different sizes based on the scaling of the “original,” which hints at the individual fragment collaged. Even though I am reimagining each image, they always bring a trace, a relationship to the context of the world from which they were taken. To me, that’s a beautiful thing.

np: The second part of this question is also about the scale presented in the images. Movies have given us an enduring relationship with space, and one in which we understand everything that comes from space or is part of the space industry as gigantic. I am thinking of the landing pads and UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), everything in Star Wars: Episode IV (1977), and even in more recent films like Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune (2021), in which humans are presented as almost insignificant in scale compared to the infrastructure, machines, and aircraft that allow them to move, survive, and ultimately thrive in space. I wonder if this comes from the incomprehensible scale of space itself, and when we try to imagine ourselves in this vastness we are often left with our insignificance. How do you think of scale in this work?

el: Science fiction films and their language are often brought up in conversations about my work. For me, this means that the worlds I build are strange enough and yet still have a glimmer of possibility that the viewer wants to adventure into them—in a similar way to what a good science fiction film does. My collages require substantive space in order for the world to function properly. Any kind of spatial configuration that feels constrained, I work against. It is also necessary that the scale within my work is convincing. I show multiple perspectives, illustrating the vast landscapes with tiny humans or little to no human presence at all, while other times I show the viewpoints from up close, from more familiar human perspectives, so that the worlds feel plausible.

When exhibited, my work also requires space, with clear sightlines and breathing room around each image. It is necessary for someone to stand in front of the work to fully experience it. I encourage others to spend time with the collage; it is not the immediacy of the image that interests me, but rather the possibility of multiple meanings that can only be accessed through intentional, focused viewing and imagining.

np: Commercial space mining is a very real possibility in the future. In 2020 NASA awarded contracts to four companies to extract small amounts of lunar regolith (dust, soil, broken rocks from the surface of the Moon) by 2024. The idea of heavy industry and large-scale resource extraction moving to space is dangerous, as agreements governing these emerging interests from a long list of countries are part of an outdated treaty framework developed during the Cold War which essentially leaves property and mining rights unregulated and open for exploitation and abuse, as well as opens the door to larger environmental and political consequences. Many of your images show industrial processes that generally are left vague so we are not sure of the details, but are simply given a vaporous glimpse at process. Can you speak to this?

el: You point to something which is very important to my practice, which is nuance. I give the images subtlety and space to take on different meanings, to open up the possibility for alternate experiences. Yes, industrial commercial space mining might be hinted at, however, I lean into my intuition when I collage, and I let the images come together. When I have a targeted agenda in mind, the collages feel very forced, constrained, and unsuccessful. What I’m reading, what I’m looking at, or what I’m thinking inevitably trickles into my imagery, and at times I am not aware of this until much later. Through leaving my collages vague, the viewer, to go back to Duchamp, holds the Creative Act to interpret the image, to complete the image, and, if they wish, to enter the image and my imaginary worlds.

np: Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life, and it was one of the topics of this forum. Fuelled by science fiction, and now driven by climate change, this speculative promise of creating new worlds is at once filled with hope, but also points to a lack of responsibility to care for the planet we do inhabit. So, while off-worlding, parallel universes, and time travel do offer the promise of escape, should we not consider why we are looking at escaping first? Are your images about escape?

el: A parallel term I often use to talk about my work is “worldbuilding,” which is still a relatively new academic discipline. Worldbuilding, to put it simply, focuses on the world itself, as opposed to the primary attention being placed on characters and their narrative development. In science fiction, since around the nineteenth century, we can see worldbuilding strategies used to question and criticize how humans treat planet Earth, and to create a conceptual space to imagine alternative futures. I take a similar approach through science fiction collage in which my aim is to explore how fragmented worlds of a reconstructed past may question our notions of linear time and reshape our thinking of future possibilities. Focusing on imagination, rather than escape, I hope that perhaps we can create a brighter future for our planet by considering alternate futures from the past or collectively imagining possible distant, more promising futures.